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The Architect: City building game in development (Again)

Enodo Games is working on The Architect Game again after putting the project on hold last year. On February The Architect Game Facebook page went active again and they have been posting screenshots of the game every week.

There isn't much information about the game yet. Unlike citybuilding games we know, The Architect is not about building a city from scratch but about transforming virtual models of real cities. The first game will be set in Paris.

What we know so far:

The game will be set in Paris, but they would like to expand it to other real cities around the world.

It will use CryEngine.

It will include different weather conditions and day/night settings.

The company behind the game is a French company based in Nice called Enodo Games, a branch of Enodo. It has an impressive portfolio of works related to 3D visualization for urbanism and architecture.

To what degree we will be able to transform Paris remains a mystery. There are no details about the gameplay yet.

Some screenshots:

A video presentation of Enodo Games (old):

A demo reel by Enodo (It's not about this game, it shows other works done by Enodo for non game related projects)

And finally the old teaser for the game, which doesn't really show much of it:

Here is a link to their Facebook page, they seem open to answer questions and take feedback.

It looks great, that quality and realism of the city is amazing. I'm just wondering how much freedom will the players have. What I was looking for was the city building equivalent to the Autodesk homestyler (http://www.homestyler.com/home). Which is what you guys (modders) are turning cites XL into. I just wish the game engine was better.

Well it's good to know that there is someone out there working on new options for city builders like us

I've checked their facebook and official website and they mention it will have weather effects and all. There's something not clear for me: what platform are they going to be releasing for? PC? others like playstation?

Somewhere in the comments they said it was one of the main goals to make this game playable on low-end pc's. To me, this doesn't look like a game for playstation but it could be. They use CryEngine which can be used to make games on Playstation 3/4, Xbox 360/One and Wii U.

For those who aren't on FB, Jean-Baptiste Reynes CEO of Enodo Games just posted this note on the game's page:

A note from the CEO of EnodoGames:

"We are so thrilled with how the first video of The Architect was welcomed!

This is a very exciting step for all the team, here at EnodoGames.

A step that confirms how intrigued – to say the least – you all are about the innovations we want to bring to you.
Sometimes, though, they also seem to worry some of you. We understand why.

I wanted to personally take a moment - between two videos (the next one should reassure you too) - to clarify a few points.

At EnodoGames, we simply adore City Builders! I played the very first SimCity on an IBM AT machine and a green monochromatic screen! It was in 1989!
Since then, we played every version of the game (wasn’t SimCity 4 just awesome?), tried each Cities XL along with all the games based on the same concept.
More recently, Cities Skylines brilliantly took over a license that has been offering, for the past 25 years, a solid gameplay based on now-classic mechanisms. Colossal Order did an amazing job!

But when our team met for the first time a started thinking about what we could bring to City Builders, we quickly realized that we had to offer something new. Not just for the sake of innovation but to really invite the gamers to a new approach, a new way of both thinking and building virtual cities. And this brought two fundamental ideas. We had to:
- create a game that would start from an existing city instead of building from scratch
- allow the players to mod buildings inside this existing city and, therefore, to give them tools that would be more precise and more accurate than the ones they are used to.
In other words: RIP RCI!

We believe that by starting the game from an existing city, you will be directly confronted with a deeper (and richer) environment. This city is already alive and you will have to get acquainted with it, negotiate with it, answer its needs or jostle it to create your own city.
It would be a mistake to think that an existing city would prevent the players from having – and implementing - their own vision for their city. Quite the contrary, we believe that what we offer will allow each and every one of you to do precisely what you want with your city!

This is why, in The Architect, the player won’t just define a “zone” for the game to fill in. You will have to define and design each of the buildings inside the city.

Of course, we chose Paris for this first edition of The Architect. And our game is not about reproducing nor rebuilding Paris over and over. It’s really about taking over the city and changing it. It is about confronting with its structure, its architecture. It’s about making your own Paris!
Will you replace the 19th century Haussman-style buildings with glass and metal sky-scrapers? What will you do with the Louvre? Will you turn Paris into a vast park? How will you answer the issue of mobility? How will you deal with power resources? What will YOUR Paris be like?

Since you will have to imagine how the city develops, we have to give you the best tools we can produce.

This is what we are doing by allowing the players to conceive buildings and, more broadly, all the spaces of this new Paris with a level of details that was never offered before in this type of game. Design your own buildings, share them with other players, update them as you go deeper into the game and give Paris a look that is yours… while answering all the challenges of the city of tomorrow.

We have conceived two specific tools to help the players create their own vision:
- the Drawing Board will allow the players to conceive their own buildings from ground to top floor and place them into the city;
- the Workshop will be where players compose their teams, hire new knowledgeable experts, acquire new skills that will allow them to create buildings that keep getting more incredible and diverse.

I will go deeper into these tools in another note. Until then, please comment and post all the questions and remarks you might have. They help us improve our work and make The Architect a better game. Your game."

Some of you have been asking what the heck we were doing these past few weeks, not posting much on here...
Well, we have been (and still are) working on lots of things! The modelization of Paris, of course, and the development of the UI. And because we like you a lot, guys, here's a first look at what the building designing tool will look like in The Architect - Paris!

They posted some new things a week ago, but since no-one has mentioned it here yet:

We received a lot of encouraging comments over the past few weeks, and we wanted to thank you for your enthusiasm for our project. We are really excited about the growing community around The Architect. We hope that you know how much we value your interest in our project.

Of course, with comments also comes questions, specifically about our 3D modelization, the overall concept of the game, and hardware requirements… We will try to answer each and every question as they come up throughout development.

Recently, we read comments that said:
- “I bet this game is gonna rival Skylines but u would need a very strong pc in order 2 play this behemoth.”
- “The house models look a bit simplistic. Skyline's engine is not as good but the models are better. Let's hope this will be improved.”

To read EnodoGames' CEO Jean-Baptiste's answer, clic on the first image below:

In The Architect-Paris, you are the head of small team of professionals entrusted with the urban management, development and evolution of the city of Paris. You will have to face climate challenges in addition to an ever-growing population, invent new transportation and mobility solutions, design and create new buildings, and develop creative solutions to deal with pollution… And to do all that,you will have to replace a large number of existing buildings.

Our team was facing a paradox: we were going to modelize the city of Paris knowing that it would eventually be transformed by the player’s choices and the addition of their own buildings. As a first step in development, we had to make several decisions and technical choices.

The city of Paris is a complicated network of roads, structures and landscape, which includes several thousand unique buildings. If we wanted our model to work on an “average PC” (and we do want it to!), we had to make the model simple so that the 3D representation of the city could be displayed in real time.

We had to imagine a specific artistic direction for the project. We decided to avoid anything too realistic, too “Google Earth-ish,” but instead came up with a vision that would be both compatible with what the game offers and as professional as ENODO’s projects can be.

Next, we chose to go deeper into the 3D modeling of specific buildings.

One of the things that makes Paris so amazing is its incredible architectural heritage. Some of the buildings are famous throughout the world, and some are iconic of Paris, like the Eiffel tower, the Louvre, the Tour Saint-Jacques… we made a list of roughly 400 buildings that we tagged as “remarkable” and our teams has been working on them in detail. These buildings, along with and the banks of the Seine River, have been modelized with more details than the other buildings in Paris.

At EnodoGames, we are still debating whether players will be allowed to work on these buildings. Whatever option we take, these remarkable buildings will be detailed enough for players to get their inspiration from when they produce their own vision of Paris.

Once we had settled on our artistic direction, we had to decide what players would be able to design and create. We wanted them to be able to identify their own created buildings on sight.

Let’s take an example:

On the left is a classic Haussmann-type architecture building as it appears in the 3D model before the player’s intervention.

On the right is a building created by the player with the same Haussmann-type style (of course, players will have the power to design more modern buildings). As you can see, the level of details is considerably higher in the player’s building.